Japanese Squirrel

Japanese Squirrel, originally uploaded by jonallen01966.

We went to the Inokashira park at the weekend. Most of the park is given over to a small zoo. There is a squirrel enclosure where hundreds of these cute little creatures are free to run around. There were record high temperatures and it was just too hot for this one!

Hokkaido Photos

I finally got around to uploading some higher quality photos from our holiday in Hokkaido.
This one, of the open road sums it up quite nicely.

This is Mt Rausu on the Shiretoko peninsula



Oshinkoshin waterfall on the Shiretoko peninsula


This is one of several very beautiful butterflies we saw


And this was the huge octopus we saw when diving off the coast of Shiretoko, Sea of Ohkotsk.

(My thanks to our very able instructor for taking the photo of us)

If you'd like to pop over to Flickr you can see some more of the photos we took.

It was quite a shock to come back to Tokyo and see more people on the subway on the way back from the airport than we had seen for the whole two weeks previously.

Seoul Ranks 9th in Centres of Commerce Index

I've just got back from holiday and I've read that MasterCard have rated Seoul 9th in their index of Worldwide Centres of Commerce published earlier this month.

London, New York and Tokyo take the top three slots, Singapore Chicago and Hong Kong follow them and Seoul rates just behind Frankfurt and Paris. The survey, prepared by a panel of experts, rates 75 cities on seven categories: Legal and political framework, Economic stability, Ease of doing business, Financial flow, Business centre, Knowledge creation and information flow, Livability.

Surprisingly Seoul ranks 4th in the Financial flow category, ahead of Tokyo, based on the number of transactions in Banking, Insurance, Financial services, Equity, Derivatives and Commodities. That could be related to the fact that Seoul is the major city in South Korea, while in Japan, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo and Fukuoka have stock exchanges which were counted separately from Tokyo.

One thing they do not seem to have taken into account are the laws relating to the location of computers for processing banking transactions. These must be physically located in South Korea, which for a multinational bank can be a bit of a hindrance. Switzerland used to have similar laws, but these were relaxed about five years ago. It's another reason Seoul will continue to rank behind the main three centres in Asia and struggle to stay ahead of the burgeoning cities of China and India.

Nakashibetsu Airport

Returned the hire car, back to Tokyo,Haneda airport.

Kushiro National Park

Wetland area.

Mount Iouzan

Steaming sulphurous hillside.

Blakiston's Fish Owl

OK. So this is a photo on the wall, but this magnificent bird's favourite fishing perch is right outside the hotel dining room and it is completely unfazed by the excited guests eager to watch it deftly snatch it's prey from the river.

Yuyado Daiichi Spa Resort

Very high standard hotel.